This blog is mainly about the spectacular train wreck at The Sacramento Bee and its parent company, the McClatchy Company. But I also post about current events, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, politics, anything else that grabs my attention. Take a look around this blog, hope you enjoy it.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

McClatchy cobbling together a bureau in Kabul

Seattle Times reporter Hal Bernton has flown to Afghanistan for a two-month rotation at McClatchy's fledgling Kabul bureau. Bernton is blogging here.

Fourteen hundred miles due east, McClatchy's bureau in Baghdad seems to have languished since bureau chief Leila Fadel left a few weeks ago. Modesto Bee reporter Adam Ashton is on temporary assignment in Baghdad. Fadel has moved to Washington DC -- and has morphed into a homeless activist.

McClatchy has not named Fadel's replacement in Baghdad.

A reliable source told me a few weeks back that Hannah Allam would be named bureau chief in Baghdad. But the position has been vacant for a few weeks, which makes me wonder if the company is re-evaluating whether the expense of maintaining a Baghdad bureau is worth it.

So will Hannah Allam head to Kabul instead of Baghdad?

(Don't expect McClatchy's web site to clarify which correspondent is where -- info on this page is way out of date.) Update: somebody finally brought the info current.

Iranian officials interviewed an alleged victim of jailhouse rape at the hands of security personnel. But instead of consoling him, they asked him embarrassing questions and blamed him for the violence.

They said it was the young man's own fault for protesting the results of Iran's June 12 presidential elections, according to a fresh account of the alleged rape published on the website of a prominent reformist politician.

"I asked them why I and others were raped in prison," the young man says he asked two interrogators and a judge who had agreed to hear his story, according to the website of former parliamentary speaker Mehdi Karroubi.

One of the three replied, "'When the supreme leader confirmed the election result, everyone should have recognized it."

The young man's tale of rape, the latest in a series of gruesome stories emerging from Iran's detention centers, was published today on the website of Karroubi's political party, Etemad Melli. (The website is in Persian.)

The young man said he was raped by guards after being locked up in Tehran's now notorious Kahrizak detention center.

He said he was at first humiliated by the experience and suicidal, but was consoled by Karroubi, a cleric, who helped him regain his composure and self-esteem.

"He devoted himself like a psychiatrist to me to convince me that I was innocent," he said, according to the account. "He cited religious examples, and I was finally convinced that when someone is raped with his hands and feet tied is not a sinner and is on the contrary an oppressed."

On July 24, the alleged victim met with an official at the chief prosecutor's office, whom he described as respectful and sympathetic.

About four weeks later, the judge and two interrogators began cross-examining him, asking him to write down everything that had happened.

They asked him embarrassing questions about the extent of penetration, and whether he enjoyed being raped.

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